Tag Archives: Maryland

In the past year, over 10,000 American citizens have petitioned elected representatives from their respective state governments to enact the “American Laws for American Courts” (ALAC) legislation, which is designed to prohibit the application of foreign law when it would violate fundamental constitutional rights such as due process and equal protection. David Yerushalmi, Co-Founder and Senior Counsel of the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC), was the principal drafter of the model legislation, which has passed in states such as Arizona, Louisiana, Kansas, and Tennessee.

AFLC sponsored a citizens awareness drive to alert Americans about this public policy initiative to protect their rights from constitutionally offensive foreign laws, including – but not limited to – sharia law. Indeed, extensive research conducted by the Center for Security Policy, a national security thank tank, has found over 50 significant cases from a small sample of published cases indicating that sharia law has permeated state court decisions nationwide.

Yerushalmi commented: “The fact that 10,000 individual Americans responded to our citizens awareness drive demonstrates the growing concern about the imposition of sharia law and its pernicious effect in American courts. Even more important, it shows that Americans are listening to AFLC’s arguments, which have exposed the fact that numerous judges nationwide have applied sharia over United States law. People get it: American Laws for American Courts is not a slogan, it is actual legislation available to every state that enacts it, and it will ensure that no state court applies foreign laws or judgments that deprive a party of their constitutional rights.”

In Hosain v. Malik, a classic example of a state court enforcing sharia law, a Maryland appellate court agreed with a lower court’s decision to defer to a Pakistani Sharia Court that granted sole, unrestricted custody of a child to her father even though the mother was not provided due process in the proceedings. The mother had argued that if she had gone to Pakistan to contest the case, she would have been subject to capital punishment for having a new relationship with a man not sanctioned by sharia. Nonetheless, the Maryland appellate court ruled that her failure to go to Pakistan and take the risk of execution precluded her from making a public policy argument against the enforcement of sharia law. In this case, ALAC would have provided the Maryland appellate court the legislative clarity to reverse the lower court’s decision.

In spite of its constitutional defenses, ALAC has faced fierce opposition from Muslim Brotherhood groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which claim that passing ALAC legislation discriminates against Muslims.

Yerushalmi commented: “Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR have joined the ‘blame-America’ Left to challenge these laws, but the fact is ALAC has not been overturned in any of the states that have passed it because it is not just a constitutional law, it is the best way to protect the constitutional liberties of all American citizens.”

Robert Muise, Co-Founder and Senior Counsel of AFLC, added: “The American Freedom Law Center commends those loyal and courageous American citizens who have sounded the alarm to their elected officials about the threat posed by sharia and other foreign laws to the American legal system. And we hope these officials heed their citizens’ concerns by sponsoring this important legislation.”

A drawing of Turkey’s $100 million mega-mosque complex being built in Maryland

The construction project in Maryland is about more than a mega-mosque. It’s symbol of how Turkey aspires to lead the Islamic ummah, including the American Muslim community.

By Ryan Mauro:

The Islamist government of Turkey is building a 15-acre, $100 million mega-mosque in Lanham, Maryland. Prime Minister Erdogan visited the site on May 15 in a ceremony that was attended by the leaders of two groups linked to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Also present was the Maryland Secretary of State, representing Maryland Governor and likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, Martin O’Malley.

The mega-mosque is called the Turkish American Culture and Civilization Center and, according to the Muslim Link, it “will likely become the largest and most striking examples of Islamic architecture in the western hemisphere” when it is finished in 2014. The Muslim Link explicitly says it is “a project of the government of Turkey.”

On May 15, Prime Minister Erdogan spoke to hundreds of people at the construction site and said he’d come back for the opening ceremony next year. He warned the audience that there are groups promoting “Islamophobia,” branding potential critics as paranoid bigots. Erdogan recently said that “Islamophobia” and Zionism are equivalent to fascism and anti-Semitism, saying they are a “crime against humanity.”

On the same trip to the U.S., Erdogan brought a special guest: The father of one of the Islamists killed in Israel’s 2010 raid on a Turkish flotilla that tried to break Israel’s legal blockade on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Erdogan reportedly wanted to him to meet President Obama.

The site will have five buildings, including a mosque “constructed using 16th century Ottoman architecture that can hold 750 worshipers.” The site’s design reinforces concerns that Turkey wants to restore its glory days as the Ottoman Empire.

The event was also attended by the leaders of two U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities.

The first, Naeem Baig, is the president of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo, which says its “work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within,” lists ICNA as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” It even refers to meetings with ICNA with talk about a merger.

ICNA is linked to the Pakistani Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami and its conferences feature radical speakers. A former ICNA president was recently indicted for horrific war crimes committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 succession from Pakistan – the torture and murder or 18 political opponents.

The second official from a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity that attended the event was Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). ISNA and several of its components are listed as U.S. Muslim Brotherhood fronts in the same 1991 Brotherhood memo. ISNA was also an unindicted co-conspiratorin the Holy Land Foundation case, dubbed the largest Islamic terror-funding trial in the history of the U.S. Federal prosecutors in the case also listed ISNA as a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity.

According to promotional material, a United States Naval Academy professor is teaching on behalf of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), a part of the US Muslim Brotherhood and where global Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi reportedly serves as a trustee. IIIT recently announced its Summer Students Program for 2013 to be held from May 26 – July 3. According to the IIIT announcement, one of the instructors for the program will be Professor Ermin Sinanovic, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland who will be teaching the following course titled “Muslim World Affairs”:

Ermin Sinanovic

This course is meant to provide students who had little or no background on the Muslim world with a basic understanding of its contemporary history, its geopolitics, its diverse cultures, languages and ethnic groups. Also, the course introduces the key issues and developments that framed the relationship between the world of Islam and the West, such as the colonial encounter, the capitalist expansion of the West, the emergence of the nation-state and its institutions, the discovery of oil in the Middle East and its implications, the communication revolution and contemporary globalization and their impact on cultures, values and life styles; and finally the US foreign policy towards the Muslim world and its implications. This course will be covered in twelve hours. Instructor: Professor Ermin Sinanovic, US Naval Academy, Maryland.

According to his bio, Ermin Sinanovic is:

…an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, USA. He studied for an MA and a PhD in Political Science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Prof. Sinanovic obtained two BAs (one in Qur’an and Sunnah Studies, the other in Political Science) and an MA (Islamic Civilization) from the International Islamic University Malaysia. His research interests include transnational Islamic revival, Southeast Asian politics, Islamic movements, Middle East politics, Islamic political thought, and Islam and politics in general. At the Naval Academy, Prof. Sinanovic teaches courses on Southeast Asian politics, Middle East politics, and Islam and politics. He speaks Bosnian, English, Arabic, and Malay. “

One of the other instructors at the IIIT summer program will be US Muslim Brotherhood leader Louay Safi, identified in the announcement as affiliated with the College of Islamic Studies of the Qatar Foundation. In 2009 Louay Safi, also an official at the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), was at the center of a controversy when it was learned that the US Defense Department brought him to Fort Hood as an instructor and that he had been lecturing on Islam to troops in Fort Hood who were about to deploy to Afghanistan. In February 2010, the activities and lectures of Dr. Safi on all military bases were suspended pending criminal by the U.S. military. A shooting took place at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas on November 5, 2009 in which a single gunman killed 13 people and over 30 people were injured in the worst shooting ever to take place on an American military base. The only suspect in the shooting is Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old U.S. Army major serving as a psychiatrist. Dr. Safi has also been recently identified as a leading member of the Syrian National Council, a Syrian opposition group dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the early 1990s, IIIT invented and promoted the term “Islamophobia,” a term which implies that any societal fear associated with Islam is necessarily irrational, even if that fear stems from the fact that Islam’s prophet and its modern-day imams call on believers to kill infidels, or from the fact that the 9/11 attacks were carried out to implement those calls. Moreover, the term suggests that any negative societal reaction to such exhortations to violence reflects a bigotry that itself should be feared.

Former IIIT member Abdur-Rahman Muhammad — who was with that organization when the word was formally created, and who has since rejected IIIT’s ideology and terminated his membership in disgust — now reveals the original intent behind the concept of Islamophobia: “This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.” In short, in its very origins, “Islamophobia” was a term designed as a weapon to advance a totalitarian cause by stigmatizing critics and silencing them. This plan was an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood’s deceptive “General Strategic Goal for North America.”

Although the term was coined in the early 1990s, “Islamophobia” did not become the focus of an active Brotherhood campaign until after 9/11.

Controlled by the extremist, Saudi-based Wahhabi movement, IIIT maintains that reports about mosques distributing hate-filled literature are untrue, and claims that the concept of jihad in no way condones or connotes violence. As an IIIT public-relations flyer puts it: “Jihad does not mean ‘holy war.’ Literally, jihad in Arabic means to strive, struggle and exert effort. It is a central and broad Islamic concept that includes struggle against evil inclinations within oneself, struggle to improve the quality of life in society, struggle in the battlefield for self-defense or fighting against tyranny or oppression.” The back of the flyer contains a list of recommended websites and books on Islam. Among the authors of these books are such apologists for extremism as John Esposito, Karen Armstrong, Hassan Hathout, and Bill Baker.

The Loudoun County School Board is reaching the denouement of a multiyear deliberation about an application for a charter school that has strong ties to Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish Islamist. His followers have already started some 135 American charter schools. Their focus is to promote an increasingly Shariah-dominated Turkey.

Yet the members of the school board have, to date, been unwilling to recognize that these problems are actually endemic in Gulen-associated schools — including Chesapeake Science Point. These problems are also much in evidence in three Gulen charter schools in Fulton County, Ga. Two of the three have lost their charters; the third — an elementary school — may soon follow suit.

I had the occasion to visit Fulton County last week and talked with several people involved in one aspect or another of its difficulties with the Gulenists. These included a former teacher, the parent of a former student and a local administrator. One thing is clear from these conversations: You simply cannot begin to understand, let alone cope with, the sorts of issues inherent in “Gulen-inspired” schools if you indulge — for whatever reason, be it “political correctness,” sensitivity to “diversity,” fear of litigation or being branded an “Islamophobe,” racist, etc. — in the pretense that applications like the one in Loudoun County can be properly evaluated while excluding from the evaluation process the 800-pound gorilla in the room: the applicants’ manifest associations to the Gulen movement.

It is a commonplace, but one that most of us ignore: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. That applies in spades to a proposal under active consideration by the school board in Virginia’s Loudoun County. It would use taxpayer funds to create a charter school to equip the children of that Washington exurb with enhanced skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Ostensibly, they will thus be equipped to compete successfully in the fields expected to be at the cutting edge of tomorrow’s workplace.

What makes this initiative, dubbed the Loudoun Math and IT Academy (LMITA), too good to be true? Let’s start with what is acknowledged about the proposed school.

LMITA’s board is made up of a group of male Turkish expatriates. One of them, Fatih Kandil, was formerly the principal of the Chesapeake Science Point (CSP) Public Charter School in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Another is Ali Bicak, the board president of the Chesapeake Lighthouse Foundation, which owns CSP and two other charter schools in Maryland. The LMITA applicants expressly claim that Chesapeake Science Point will be the model for their school.

The taxpayers of Loudoun County and the school board elected to represent them should want no part of a school that seeks to emulate Chesapeake Science Point, let alone be run by the same people responsible for that publicly funded charter school. For one thing, CSP has not proven to be the resounding academic success the applicants claim. It does not appear anywhere in the acclaimed US News and World Report lists of high-performing schools in Maryland, let alone nationwide – even in the subsets of STEM or charter schools.

What is more, according to public documents chronicling Anne Arundel Public Schools’ dismal experience with CSP, there is significant evidence of chronic violations of federal, state and local policies and regulations throughout its six years of operations, with little or inconsistent improvement, reflecting deficiencies in fiscal responsibility and organizational viability.

Why, one might ask, would applicants for a new charter school cite so deeply problematic an example as their proposed institution? This brings us to aspects of this proposal that are not acknowledged.

Chesapeake Science Point is just one of five controversial schools with which Mr. Kandil has been associated: He was previously: the director at the Horizon Science Academy in Dayton, Ohio; the principal at the Wisconsin Career Academy in Milwaukee and at the Baltimore Information Technology Academy in Maryland; and one of the applicants in a failed bid to establish the First State Math and Science Academy in Delaware.

These schools have something in common besides their ties to the peripatetic Fatih Kandil. They have all been “inspired” by and in other ways are associated with Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish supremacist and imam with a cult-like following of up to six million Muslims in Turkey and elsewhere around the world. More to the point, Gulen is the reclusive and highly autocratic leader of a global media, business, “interfaith dialogue” and education empire said to be worth many billions and that is run from a compound in the Poconos.

This empire – including its roughly 135 charter schools in this country and another 1,000 abroad – and its adherents have come to be known as the Gulen Movement. But those associated with it, in this country at least, are assiduously secretive about their connections to Imam Gulen or his enterprise. For example, the LMITA applicants, their spokeswoman and other apologists have repeatedly misled the Loudoun school board, claiming that these Turkish gentlemen and their proposed school have nothing to do with Gulen.

There are several possible reasons for such professions. For one, the Gulen schools are said to be under investigation by the FBI. A growing number of them – including Chesapeake Science Point – have also come under critical scrutiny from school boards and staff around the country. In some cases, they have actually lost their charters for, among other reasons, chronic financial and other mismanagement and outsourcing U.S. teachers’ jobs to Turks.

The decisive reason for the Gulenist lack of transparency,however, may be due to their movement’s goals and modus operandi. These appear aligned with those of another secretive international organization that also adheres to the Islamic doctrine known as shariah and seeks to impose it worldwide: the Muslim Brotherhood. Both seek to accomplish this objective by stealth in what the Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad” and Gulen’s movement describes as “jihad of the word.”

This practice enabled the Gulenists to help transform Turkey from a reliable, secular Muslim NATO ally to an Islamist state deeply hostile to the United States – one aligned with other Islamic supremacists, from Iran to the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas to al Qaeda. Fethullah Gulen’s followers clearly don’t want us alive to the obvious dangers posed by their penetration of our educational system and influence over our kids.

The good news is that members of the Loudoun County school board have a code of conduct which reads in part: “I have a moral and civic obligation to the Nation which can remain strong and free only so long as public schools in the United States of America are kept free and strong.” If the board members adhere to this duty, they will reject a seductive LMITA proposal that is way too “good” to be true.

Republican convention delegates voted last week to adopt a platform plank, cautioning against the use of foreign law in U.S. courts. While jurists such as Supreme Court Justice Scalia have said that “foreign legal materials can never be relevant to an interpretation of the meaning of the U.S. Constitution,” and Justice Thomas has written that the Court should not “impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans,” other jurists have searched foreign legal sources to locate “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

This GOP platform provision, however, represents something beyond concern over the practice of buttressing sketchy legal reasoning with extra-American sources; the GOP statement also objects to Sharia law or any other foreign legal code that threatens to creep into judicial decisions disguised as validated ethnic customs. As suggested, this admonition would apply when claims in a legal dispute are based upon cultural codes with deficient individual and civil right protections compared to American constitutional standards.

The publicized New Jersey spousal abuse case first raised widespread alarm when a trial court judge refused to issue a restraining order against a husband despite the established record of domestic violence and assault (reversed on appeal). The judge ruled that the husband did not demonstrate sufficient legal criminal intent in light of an imam’s testimony that wives are required to comply with husbands’ sexual demands. The man’s wife, known in the opinion as S.D., was 17 on the day of her wedding and did not know the bridegroom before the marriage ceremony in Morocco.

Another case that presented the Sharia terms of a foreign marriage in an American court is that of Joohi Hosain. When Joohi left her marriage (under strict Sharia rules, wives are not generally allowed to sue for divorce), her husband in Pakistan sued for custody of their daughter, Joohi fled to America on a student visa with her daughter, and eventually presented her custody case in U.S. courts after her by-then-ex-husband pursued her to Maryland. Although Joohi explained that making an appearance in a Pakistani court would likely result in accusations of adultery and the possible punishment of whipping or stoning, the Maryland appellate court determined that even so, the mother had the notice and opportunity to be heard and was thus afforded proper due process. The Maryland Court of Special Appeals then deferred to the Pakistani ruling that it was in the best interest of the child for the father to have primary custody.

About half of the cases involving Sharia family customs which have been presented for adjudication by American judges involve marriages solemnized in other countries, but many Islamic domestic marriages are also based on Sharia norms. These domestic unions present unique challenges: they often begin with disregard for the state law regarding the registration of officiants and the licensing of marriages. Even worse is the disregard for due process and informed contract formation when marriages and property distributions are arranged without the bride’s participation.

After a review of both foreign and domestic Islamic marriages, I recently presented a survey to the Federalist Society that considered both published and unpublished family court cases that adjudicated Sharia terms. To date, about 25 U.S. family law cases reflect the U.S. approval of the Sharia-based marital terms in the family court or the court of appeal.

Reports (at “Live” wire , repeated at Salon) are quoting Kansas Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach to the effect that the GOP platform has adopted an amendment which addresses Sharia encroachment. Kobach stated,

We see it from the top where the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly quoted foreign law in interpreting our U.S. constitution and it’s actually coming in at the bottom as well, it’s being raised as an argument in courts around the country. We actually put a provision affecting Kansas statute this year and I think it’s important for us to say foreign sources of law should not be used as part of common law decisions or statutory interpretations by judges in the lower state courts as well.

…I’m not aware of any court that’s accepted the argument, but in cases involving either spousal abuse or assault or other crimes against persons, sometimes defenses are raised that are based in Sharia law

Despite the predictable sneering and distressing ignorance which frames these reports by two agitprop “journalists,” and Kobach’s own noble, if incomplete assessment of the profundity of the problem, this is very welcome news.

Kobach referred to Kansas’s recently passed law-a version of American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) legislation-which should remind us all that the earliest of these laws (now also passed in Tennessee, Arizona, and Louisiana) have been in effect for several years without being challenged, let alone overturned. David Yerushalmi recently provided a very clear, didactic example of the need for ALAC-style laws, which corrects Kobach’s assessment about courts not having accepted Sharia-based arguments.

…the court enforced a Pakistani Sharia court’s judgment of custody in favor of the father even though the mother had argued that she was not provided due process because had she gone to Pakistan to contest the case, she could have been subject to capital punishment for having a new relationship with a man not sanctioned by sharia.

The salient facts of the case, and appellate court ruling, were summarized by Yerushalmi as follows:

The Maryland appellate court ruled that since the woman could not prove she’d be executed had she gone to Pakistan to litigate custody in the Pakistan Sharia Court, which is a national-state court in Pakistan, her failure to go to Pakistan and take the risk of execution precluded her from making the void as against public policy argument. ALAC would have provided the Maryland appellate court the legislative clarity to have reversed the lower court’s outrageous decision.

Here are the Maryland appellate court’s own words, cited by Yerushalmi:

Additionally, appellant [the mother] asserts that the Pakistani custody orders were founded on principles of law repugnant to Maryland public policy because the Pakistani courts allegedly “penalized the mother for not appearing without considering the affect of her admission to adultery on her ability to return to Pakistan.” In this regard, appellant points out that if convicted under Pakistani criminal law, her penalty could be public whipping or death by stoning. Although Dr. Malik [the expert] opined that appellant would be arrested for adultery if she returned to Pakistan for the custody proceedings, he also conceded that punishment for adultery was extremely unlikely and that proving the crime was extremely difficult. Given this testimony, the circuit court was not clearly erroneous in not considering the effect of whether appellant’s admission to adultery [under sharia] was “repugnant” to Maryland public policy in its failure to find that the Pakistani courts punished her for not appearing.”}

Let me summarize for the (hope against hope) edification of the “Live” wire , and Salon, agitprop journalists, the liberty-crushing, dehumanizing nature of Sharia: open-ended jihadism to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic order; rejection of bedrock Western liberties-including freedom of conscience and speech-enforced by imprisonment, beating, or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable pariahs, and even Muslim women to subservient chattel; and barbaric punishments which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption.

Notwithstanding the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America’s (AMJA’s) mainstream acceptance, including uncritical endorsement of its seventh annual American conference in Houston (October 15-18, 2010) to train American imams, AMJA has issued rulings which sanction the killing of apostates (here), “blasphemers” (including non-Muslims guilty of this “crime”; here), or adulterers (by stoning to death, here), and condone marital rape. Even more ominously, another Arabic-language fatwa from AMJA’s Dr. Salah Al-Sawy leaves open the possibility for offensive jihad against America and the West, as soon as Muslims are strong enough to do so. When asked whether “the Islamic missionary effort in the West … [was] to the point where it could take advantage of offensive jihad,” Al-Sawy ruled:

The Islamic community does not possess the strength to engage in offensive jihad at this time. With our current capabilities, we are aspiring toward defensive jihad, and to improve our position with regards to jurisprudence at this stage. But there is a different discussion for each situation. Allah Almighty knows best.

Just six months ago (3/14/12), Translating Jihad put what one might wish to deem as these circumscribed, “purely Islamic” rulings, in a more disturbing-and entirely unacceptable, seditious context. AMJA’s own words make plain the organization’s long term commitment to superseding the US legal code with its antithesis, a Sharia-based system.